In a brief moment of downtime at the Team Angus desk this week, my self-confessed shortcomings surfaced in conversation.
Admittedly a coffee break provides barely enough time to even scratch the surface of said failings, but this memory was connected to Monday Matters and the work of a one-time rival on our now sister paper the Press and Journal.
He too wrote a weekly column and once penned a brilliant yarn about his cat’s fascination with the flames of a roaring log fire — and the singed moggie’s rapid ascent up the lum after it jumped into the hearth to try and catch the orange flickers in front of it.
Classic, side-splitting stuff that still brightens my memory probably 20 years on.
Of course, nowadays, if it’s canine and kitty funnies you want then look no further than that sharer of absolutely everything — your personal data included — Facebook.
It positively rains cats and dogs on most people’s daily feeds on the likes of Facebook and You Tube as social media’s appetite for animal-related hilarity is sated.
Even to the extent of having a dog doing a Nazi salute to repeated commands of ‘gas the Jews’ and ‘sieg heil’.
A Coatbridge man brought anti-Semitism into the training regime of his girlfriend’s Pug — he claimed to annoy her — but after positing the video online he’s now been convicted of a hate crime.
Mark Meechan will be sentenced next month, but the case has triggered a freedom of speech debate involving figures such as Ricky Gervais, as well as readers of The Courier whose own opinions have already appeared in our letters page.
On this one I am firmly with the director of the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities Ephraim Borowski, who condemned the You Tuber’s use of the marching signal of Nazi stormtroopers in Meechan’s misguided attempt to wind up his girlfriend.
As I am sure would be many of the Angus young people deeply affected by visits to the camps where millions died after going there on trips organised by the Holocaust Education Trust.
As Mr Borowski succinctly put it: “The Holocaust is not a subject for jocular content.”
